Filetypes

Jörg M. Colberg, an accomplished astrophysicist and photographer, created a series of images entitled "American Pixels" in which he applied a self-made compression algorithm to photographs, turning them into artworks of the digital age.

But Colberg's works aren't just commentaries on the state of images in an age of lossy file types. He designed his own compression algorithm that responds uniquely to the contents of each photograph.

For Colberg, the compression becomes part of the creative progress. He explains:

A computer that creates a jpeg does not know anything about the contents of the image: It does what it is told, in a uniform manner across the image.